Tony Blair Institute senior policy advisor Adam Bradshaw today (July 11) said that the organisation believes the 10-year health plan published last week is “broadly positive” but stressed that details on its delivery are missing.
Speaking at a Westminster Health Forum conference on the next steps for obesity prevention and care in England, he stressed that the plan “seems to set out really nice ambitions in some places, but there doesn’t seem to be a plan to actually deliver on this”.
“There is a really large delta between these ambitions and the reality that is on the ground at the moment,” he said, adding that “the government really needs a clear plan to deliver on this at the pace and scale required”.
Read more: All the headlines from the government’s NHS 10-year plan
Speaking about the government’s planned shift from sickness to prevention, Bradshaw said that the institute is “absolutely in agreement that these broad public health interventions should be placed at the centre [of the plan] – it’s incredibly important”.
But he added that from a “politician’s perspective”, the three big shifts are “quite intangible” and benefits will mostly be seen in the “long term”.
GLP-1 “fallout”
The conference also focused on the rise of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs) – such as Mounjaro and Wegovy – with British Society of Lifestyle Medicine vice president Dr Ellen Fallows telling delegates that the NHS is “experiencing the fallout from poorly regulated private GLP-1 provision”.
“We’re seeing things like malnutrition from people not being properly supported with nutrition” as well as “inappropriate prescriptions” and drug interactions, she said.
Read more: Blair report urges online pharmacy weight loss jab expansion
“I worry at some point we’re going to see people running out of the ability to pay privately” for weight loss injections and then having to “[deal] with distress that goes with the weight regain seen when people stop these medicines”, she added.
And Imperial College London research fellow Dr Elisa Pineda stressed that “GLP-1 medications can be powerful tools, but they are not magic ones”.
Read more: If Blair’s obesity strategy swerves safety, give pharmacy the wheel
It comes after Prime Minister Keir Starmer last week (July 3) hinted at plans to make “innovative” weight loss services available in pharmacies in the future as part of the 10-year plan.
Meanwhile, the Tony Blair Institute published a report in May calling for weight loss drugs to be rolled out to more patients via national NHS contracts with “a handful of private providers”.
Among other things, it recommended that this wider rollout take place “predominantly through digital channels”, in particular online pharmacies, saying that rollout at scale through general practice is “probably both infeasible and unreasonable”.
